Tag: history

This’ll be my first post in a while, but, as ever with this blog, I feel I’ve got something to say, and I don’t want it just to reach my Facebook friends (who are probably inundated with posts from me anyway), but I also need more than Twitter’s 140 characters. Still, I’ll try and keep in short and sharp.

Today, 27th Jan, as you might see in the media, is Holocaust Memorial Day. A day when we stop and reflect on the massacre of 11 million Jews, Roma, disabled, Slavs, POWs, LGBT+, and anyone else deemed undesirable by the state of Nazi Germany.

As a historian, I would say today is vital. The primary role of history is arguably to learn from the mistakes, developments, and lessons of the past, and that requires us to grit our teeth and face all the awful things humanity has done.
Yet at the same time, today is not enough. I said the same about International Women’s Day last year – why is it that we devote just one day to institutionally thinking about the historical struggles of women? Why, too, do we deem only one day a year enough to stop and remember the lessons from one of mankind’s darkest hours?
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying there should be two Holocaust Memorial Days per year, or that it’s pointless to have one. In and of itself, today serves an effective purpose – as does International Women’s Day, etc.
What I’m saying is that to spend one day a year reflecting on those mistakes and then the rest of the year filing them away in the backs of our minds is ludicrous.

You may think that’s an extreme thing to say, but for me it’s simple: we don’t practise the rest of the year what we preach today. This isn’t just about the Holocaust; it’s about all of history. Today, we use rose-tinted textbooks to glorify what should be condemned. More than 4 in 10 Britons think the British empire was a force for good – forgetting that the modern world’s first instances of concentration camps were created by the British colonists in South Africa. And you have political forces like UKIP arguing that we should spend less time teaching about Western slavery of Africans and more time teaching about Arabs taking Brits from the southern coasts. (Huh?!) In the USA, they have rightly begun to start protesting against Columbus day, which covers up the fact that Columbus enslaved and wiped out peoples with the fact that he discovered the Americas. The Japanese government has finally agreed to reparations with South Korea over the ‘comfort women’ issue (one of the many Japanese atrocities in WWII, and South Korea was not the only nation to suffer) – and all the while, its state-funded Meiji Shrine contains a memorial to 1905 – ‘the glorious unification of the two nations’ of Korea and Japan, glossing over what that unification meant for Korea.

Today, politicians across the Western world are pulling this curious magic trick, where with one hand they stuff platitudes about their own opinions of Holocaust Memorial Day down our throats, while with the other, they dehumanize refugees, ignore them, or lock them up – ignoring the fact that both are part of the same process. Right now, David Cameron is being (thankfully) lambasted for speaking about Holocaust Memorial Day and referring to those stuck at Calais as “a bunch of migrants” in sentences within a few minutes of each other. But for the most part, we let it slide! You have the Daily Mail comparing immigrants to rats, Donald Trump basing a campaign on the idea that Mexicans and Muslims should be physically kept out of the United States, and Denmark making it legal to confiscate refugees’ possessions.
And here’s the thing; no big process in humanity has ever been sudden. Horrors like the Holocaust are the culmination of long trends wherein the Overton window – what is acceptable in public discourse and what is not – gradually shifts. The rise of the Nazis is perhaps the shortest, sharpest historical example of this, but today, it’s evident everywhere. The Jews of 1930s Germany are now American Muslims, Syrian refugees, and so many others – still including, in fact, Jewish people in places like Hungary.
Which is why it really irks me to see neo-fascists refute the idea that they’re Nazis. How could they be, especially if they’re from a nation who suffered under the Nazis? Well, no, you’re not Nazis, per se, but you’re just in an earlier stage of exactly the same process, trudging along the same inevitable road that so many humans in history have walked before.

This issue is especially problematic for the USA, UK, and Russia, who have the distinction of having defeated the Nazis. That allows us to say, in our nationalism-twisted memories, that “we’re not Nazis – we beat the Nazis.” Well, yes, we did, but that doesn’t mean we’re not liable to commit exactly the same atrocities – in the same way as, conversely, the nation of Germany has made its way from the Nazis regime to being a global leader in human rights. Again, we hold the legacy of having defeated fascism in one hand, ignoring the all-too-familiar trends and acts we commit with the other.
Somehow, paradoxically, commemoration of the Holocaust has made us blind to when we repeat the same processes. We’re all human, at the end of the day, we’re all the same – and none of us is above committing atrocities; from U.S. internment of Japanese Americans to even the actions of the state of Israel against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Amazingly, through all of this, you know who stands out? Germany. When I visited Berlin last year, I was astounded and inspired by the memorials over the city. This is a country that has made it a goal to face up to the horrors of its past, no matter how difficult the process, and by and large, they’ve succeeded. Every country has its problems, and Germany is not perfect, but it is the country that has taken the lead in the refugee crisis – for which Angela Merkel was awarded Time’s Person of the Year. Historians and sociologists may pick finer points to argue with me over, but for the most part, Germany stands out to me as an example of facing up to, and learning from, all of its history.

Denying history is unacceptable. Setting aside one day for political obfuscation, and then going back to repeating the same mistakes we condemn, is barely a step removed from that.
So yes, niemals vergessen. We should never, ever forget the Holocaust – not for a single day.

We as a generation have an interesting relationship with clichés and analogies. In our mass media and pop culture saturation, it’s very easy for the hivemind to pick up on one theme, or one item, and run with it, at the expense of our paying attention to other equally worthy items. A recent example would be the collective outrage over Cecil the Lion, when cynics were quick to point out that we’re ignoring the gross animal abuses that take place on a much larger scale in our very own livestock industries for the sake of a single lion, rather humanely (if illegally) killed.

There is probably encyclopaediarum* worth of blog posts and articles already written on the disproportionality of trends in social media, but that’s not quite what I’m getting at here. What I’ve been thinking about is how, thanks to this pop culture (and social media) saturation for the last 50 years, one historical instance of a subject can be repeated and repeated, until it becomes the go-to example for that subject. In internet writings on any subject matter, 99% of the time this particular example will be the one to come up.
*[genitive plural, just like “years’ worth”, check your Latin]

To put my fact where my abstract is: need to draw comparison to a cult? You’ll probably end up naming the Manson family. Need a nuclear disaster? Chernobyl. Racial segregation? South African Apartheid. Need a mass murderer? Jack the Ripper will usually do the trick, or Ed Gein, especially if you want him to be a bit “weird” with his victims. More positive examples: in sport, footballers are so often looking for “the next [Beckham/Pélé/Maradona/Messi/Ronaldo]”, and hockey players are ALWAYS talking about Wayne Gretsky. It’s hard to talk about rock guitar without someone bringing up Hendrix or Jimmy Page (ew).
And of course, the one I’ve tried to avoid as much as possible – need a totalitarian state? Nazi Germany. A state where fearmongering wins out over rationality? Nazi Germany. Books are burned? Nazi Germany. Racism? Nazi freaking Germany. Is someone slightly controlling, cruel, or abusive of their authority? They’re “worse than Hitler”. Nazi Germany embodied the extremes of so many tropes of history that Godwin’s Law even states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

I’m not saying that these examples are irrelevant or unjustified: quite the opposite. (In fact, I’ve got a blog post coming up specifically about how comparisons to the Nazis are actually more cliché than they should be. They’re often perfectly appropriate – the rise of UKIP, alongside Katie Hopkins and David Cameron recently calling migrants “cockroaches” and “swarms” respectively, exemplifies exactly how insidiously the politics of fear can take hold, as they did in 1930s Germany). My point is that thanks to their repeated reference in popular culture, these examples become the only ones we can think of. Case in point: all of the examples I used above are based entirely on my familiarity with the internet and pop culture, and nothing to do with my knowledge of the subjects themselves.

My problem with this is sort of twofold: first, it impedes our expanding minds and limits our education to the bare minimum of understanding the subject. When one example will suffice, why do we ever need to look further into the subject, even if there are more appropriate examples of just slightly less renown? Moreover, the examples aren’t always the best, most appropriate, or most egregious instances of their subjects.
E.g:
-to refer to the “next Beckham” in British football discounts the legacies of Alan Shearer, Gary Lineker and Frank Lampard. (I can’t expand much more as my knowledge of football is kind of limited to those “big names”, hence making my point exactly.)
-When you’re talking about innovative rock in the 1960s and 70s, I will not dispute the title of Hendrix as one of the absolute greats, but frankly Tony Iommi’s sound and playing style took rock guitar in equally new and inventive directions. I won’t even hear a case for Jimmy Page (hence the “ew” above) – one of the most sued-for-plagiarism musicians in rock history – when his contemporary Ritchie Blackmore was busy pioneering the neoclassical guitar style. Blackmore and Iommi just happen to be a little bit less famous. An up-and-coming player with amazing speed and tapping skills is more likely to be compared to Page or Clapton (ironically nicknamed “Slowhand”) than s/he is to Eddie van Halen, even though van Halen is a much more appropriate comparison.
-For mass murderers: Jack The Ripper only killed 7 people, granted in a rather brutal fashion. Ed Gein only killed 2. Elizabeth Bathory or Gilles de Rais make for much more brutal, frankly interesting and non-trite serial killers, but because Jack the Ripper was such a media frenzy even at the time, and because Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill were partly based on Gein, those are our “go-to” serial killers.
-To refer to anything and everything cult-related in the same breath as the Manson family simplifies everything we know about cults – in their many and varied forms – to one instance of a group of murderers led by a mass murderer. This gives us completely the wrong impression of what cults actually are and what they do – thus misrepresenting their effect on, and place in, society.
–Apartheid. This is really what prompted me to write this post, since, as a half-South African who loves his relatives, I am particularly sensitive to representations of apartheid-era South Africa. I must first disclaim that in no way do I endorse racism or racial segregation. My problem with apartheid being the “go-to” example for racial segregation is that it’s presented, much like Nazi Germany, as this sort of unique evil that could only have taken place in its particular place and time, and “we” would never do that sort of thing these days. It demonises all white South Africans (for something that many of them opposed, and many more of them actually had no say in) as a unique group of racists in history, meanwhile discounting ALL THE OTHER EXAMPLES of racism and racial segregation. South Africa had racial segregation 1948-1994 – a total of 46 years. The United States of America’s much less known ‘Jim Crow Laws’ of racial segregation existed on paper from 1890 until 1965 – a total of 75 years. The state of Alabama did not posthumously pardon the innocent Scottsboro Boys until 2013. Need I go on? How about the caste system in India? As a matter of fact, all colonial powers and their relationships with their colonies? Of course those instances are going further and further back in history, and you could argue that the post-WWII world with the end of European imperialism demands different standards. Certainly, South Africa maintaining segregation until 1994 is pretty damn shocking, but at the same time there was also a racially-motivated war going on in the Balkans, genocides and all, that occupies far less of our attention today. What really stands out about the South African example of apartheid is that it is the one that, time-wise, coincided with the rise of mass media and popular culture, and so that became our “go-to” example for racial segregation – and, to make a linguistic point, it will ever remain thus while we use the Afrikaans word “apartheid”.
-Chernobyl works well as a counter-point, because Chernobyl was for an extremely long time the greatest nuclear disaster in history. BUT today we have Fukushima. Sources disagree on which was “worse”, because you have to factor in radiation levels (on which they seem quite equal), number of lives affected, etc. But Chernobyl remains the “go-to” comparison for nuclear disaster, sometimes giving way even to “Three Mile Island”, even though we now have a more present, more vivid example from Japan.
-Finally, the Nazis. I’m glad I’m getting tired of writing this post, because it is very easy to go on and on about the Nazis, and I don’t want to do that. But basically, all the points I’ve made so far apply here. -Totalitarian state? How about North Korea, the White Terror in Taiwan, or the DDR – all of which were/are more effective and controlling than the Third Reich? -A population gone hysterical with nationalism? Cultural Revolution-era China. -War crimes, atrocities, and genocide? How about Imperial Japan: the horrifying treatment of prisoners, Unit 731, and the Rape of Nanjing, of which so many of my friends are ignorant? or the Armenian Genocide of 1915, which remains unrecognised by so many governments? And how about the war crimes of the United States of America – the only state ever to have used nuclear weapons in war, and napalm in Viet Nam? None of these caused nearly as much death as the Holocaust, it’s true (though the Rape of Nanjing caused an unimaginable ~200,000 in six weeks alone). But surely, if only for the sake of maintaining a full understanding of the world, these other instances deserve more of our recognition. Perhaps, you say, Nazi Germany represents all of the above. But so did the USSR in the 1930s, during which more than 20 million of Stalin’s own people died. Likewise, the regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge remains for me the most atrocious in history, during which a full QUARTER of Cambodia’s population was killed in four years alone. Needless to say, none of the above excuses or ameliorates the crimes of Nazi Germany, nor am I seeking to do that. All I’m saying is that, like Apartheid, these awful things can’t be viewed as something unique to their time and place, but have recurred throughout history, and we need to understand and be aware.

This post, grim though it was, has mostly been to make my point about what I’ve called the “go-to example”. Ultimately, it is both risky and limiting to continually use one particular example as a hallmark, standard, or milestone in any subject matter. The “go-to” example may be germane, and it may be effective – but it comes at the expense of our broader knowledge and, in the end, it probably says more about the pervasive role of the media and pop culture than it does about the subject matter.

Back at my alma mater, and in my current masters, the subject I’ve pursued is best described as ‘area studies’. Chinese with Japanese (~75% language, 25% culture/history) under the title of ‘Asian & Middle Eastern Studies’ for my BA, and a mixture of Chinese Law, Japanese History, Taiwanese Society and International Politics of East Asia for my MA.

For many, this seems quite wishy-washy. Indeed, in our modern vocation-driven learning environment, “area studies” doesn’t provide nearly as good an idea of my skills as, say, “law” or “economics” would for others. Even within the humanities, in which, for example, history and anthropology degrees are often (unfairly) derided as not setting students up for the future, they do at least provide you with extensive training in the methodologies* of history/anthropology and so train you for a career in that subject area. Meanwhile, with the variety of topics it covers, ‘Area Studies’ seems to imply more of a “jack of all trades, master of none” approach.

*If you’re not familiar with academia, the methodology is the approach you take to any subject. Simply put, even if you’re writing about the same subject, say the assassination of Bill McKinley, then a historian would take a vastly different approach, consider different factors, and structure a paper differently, from a sociology/political studies/law major.

The shortcomings of area studies were emphasised personally to me quite recently. In a meeting with one of my essay supervisors, she asked about my course generally, and my plans for the future. When I told her about my other modules and that I was hoping to go abroad to do another Masters in East Asian studies (with different modules), she looked concerned and said she was “worried about what direction [I’m] headed in, academically”. Now, she’s a good lecturer, very good at her subject, and I respect the hell out of her, but I kind of resented that.

So if I’m worried about what the area studies label means for my employment prospects, why insist on using it? Why not just say I have a degree in Chinese and Japanese? Well:
A) because I set quite high standards for myself and I don’t consider my own level of either Chinese or Japanese to be degree-level – not compared to my peers who only took one or the other, and certainly not these days. The last thing I want to do is mislead someone into thinking I’m fluent in both languages (though I do have a working knowledge of both) and come out looking like an idiot when I can’t translate to the standard they need.
B) because to say my degree trained me to speak Chinese and Japanese would be to neglect the many and wonderful things that the non-language-based learning has introduced me to. While I love languages, it was learning about things like Confucianism and Mohism, like the Gempei War, the Meiji Restoration and Dr. Sun Yat-sen that really made East Asia a world that I wanted to discover. Arguably, without learning the languages, I couldn’t have discovered those things, but there are many great scholars before me who have done the translation legwork, and so much of this is now available in English. This is by no means to deny the utility of studying languages, and my languages in particular, but just that I feel the true value of my education so far has not derived solely from a fluency in one or two languages, but from that and everything else that I have discovered about a world still so far removed from our own.

So that’s why I cling to the label. Moreover, I’m proud to, and I’m actually glad that I chose the multidisciplinary, jack-of-all-trades approach. This is because, while I’ve not spent three years studying history, or politics, etc, at the postgraduate level, I have at least been given a pretty decent grounding in all of those methodological approaches. And thanks to the fact that I’ve studied one particular area of the world in depth, I have a decent grounding in those methodologies as pertains specifically to an area that not many people have experience of. As far as (academic) career prospects are concerned, I may not be able to jump straight into foreign policy institutes, but I do have enough knowledge that if I wanted to pursue that path, with a little elbow grease and a little willingness to start at the lower levels, it’s still a viable option. Imagine it like a long corridor, with many different doors. Each piece of expertise can get you into one suite, and once you’re in, you can get further and further into that suite with the grounding you’ve been given. I may not be able to get beyond the entrance hall of any particular suite, but so many more doors on that corridor feel open to me.

And ultimately, those open doors – not just in careers, but in life – are the most important thing to me. By studying what I like to study from so many different angles, I feel truly enlightened. In my Chinese Law course, there are honest historical explanations as to why Chinese law on freedom of religion is still so stringent (hint: less ‘communism’, more ‘Taipings and Boxers’), and my professor seemed to really appreciate the historical perspectives I could offer. Likewise, there is a real discussion to be had over whether escalations in Chinese/Japanese tensions are easily explained by political models of behaviour or whether there is a deep-seated historical, even sociological, animosity between the two. Especially in places beyond our cultural safety-net of the Western world, you simply can’t understand one aspect of non-Western societies out of context.

One of my best friends is a rather fantastic lawyer in London – studying Chinese Law this year has not made me an expert in law, but it has given me a far greater appreciation for what he and all law students go through, and it’s honestly enriched our friendship. We’ve had long discussions over pints about mediation vs. litigation, and it was on such an informal, fun level that we could have been talking about the football. And that sort of thing is what makes area studies so valuable to me. It may be a slower career path than most, but looking beyond careers, to what it has meant for my life and my views on the world, I am so glad I’ve chosen this path.